Now? Now we've gotten rid of the servers. Slowly and steadily we are getting rid of our earthly form and ascending into the next stage, the cloud.

The cloud, or Brahman as the hindus call it, is the All, surrounding everything. It is everywhere; immaterial, yet very real.

If there is data, there is The Pirate Bay.

Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours.

All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing. The site that you're at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us.

The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world’s most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure.

Back in 1977, he wrote a book called The Adolescence of P-1 in which a gradually "becoming sentient" AI program "hides" itself, and ultimately becomes virtually eradication-proof by packetizing and spreading itself through every network on the planet. The only way to kill it would be to shut down everything on the planet simultaneously.

The book (along with Brunner's Shockwave Rider) is considered one of the earliest examples of someone using a computer worm/virus theme in science fiction. But IMO, what is even more interesting is how this novel anticipated so much of how interconnected - and vulnerable - our world would eventually become due to our reliance on data networks.

It's a good read too. And not too "dated" from a tech perspective. Despite its age, much of the technology posited in the story holds up remarkably well.

(Note: in the story there's a interesting section that talks about how the 'old' mainframes used to be administrated and operated. There's a part about putting up and taking down memory "partitions" and "queuing" jobs by a human "scheduler" that will look very similar to what those of use who use virtual machines now do on our own PCs. Just goes to show that little is ever really "new" when it comes to computers.)

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@Renegade: Apotheosis? You actually used apotheosis in a sentence? I love it!

Which reminded me of a trance CD I have - the band's name is "Apotheosis". Being as TPB has ascended into the cloud, never again to be molested by the fuzz, it seemed like a divine choice of words for a heavenly site that causes hell for the MAFIAA.

^The first time I encountered that word (it's a good word too btw) was in a musical composition called The Bewitched by Harry Partch.

Quote

The impetus for The Bewitched came in 1952 when an undisclosed man approached Partch and asked him to “write a series of “backgrounds” for television airplane crashes, drowning, and murders in the park…” Partch was intrigued by the idea but perhaps differed in interpretation. These “backgrounds” or scenarios poke fun at the thought of doing such a thing seriously. Partch also gained inspiration from the dozens of musicians that flocked to him in search of something new. He called them “the lost musicians” and dedicated the first eighteen minutes of The Bewitched to them, their pursuit, and their subsequent discoveries. The third muse behind this magical spoof is, of course, the witch. Partch’s witch is not an evil, seventeenth century Puritanical idea of a witch. Rather, Partch goes back further to the “ancient idea of the benevolent, all-knowing witch” (Partch 334).

In the album notes Partch explains that we are all under some kind of spell. We are the products of our environments, cultural conditioning, and systematic brainwashing. While it may be impossible to completely untangle ourselves from such a bewitchment, pure experience and liberation can be found by breaking free into the moment.

'Apotheosis' was in the title of the eighth scene: A Court in its Own Contempt Rises to a Motherly Apotheosis.

Intriguing notion - a court, by its own behavior, finds itself in contempt of itself. Awesome!

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Note: if you're really into music you have to check out the work of Harry Partch. He didn't just compose. He created an entirely new musical universe with it's own 43-tone scale, unique instruments, notational systems, and performance criteria - all meticuloussly documented and discussed in his book Genesis of a Music.

It's well worth putting up with old mono recordings and crappy YouTube dubs to hear some what he created.

The first comment at TPB:(see attachment in previous post)Which reminded me of a trance CD I have - the band's name is "Apotheosis". Being as TPB has ascended into the cloud, never again to be molested by the fuzz, it seemed like a divine choice of words for a heavenly site that causes hell for the MAFIAA.